ELEPHANT MOON
Page 28
She soothed Peach’s brow with a damp rag, and kissed him on the lips and said: ‘Stay with us, you damned fool.’
A murmur outside, and she raised her head to look out of the window to see the entire school watching, silent in sympathy.
At nine o’clock sharp, they heard the drone of an aeroplane engine, rising and falling. The pilot turned to his first officer, saying ‘Looks like a bloody zoo down there’ and tilted the wing, losing height with every second.
THE END
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, but the story of the elephant men rescuing refugees from Burma after the Fall of Rangoon in 1942 is true. Two men in particular stand out: J. H. Williams, author of Elephant Bill, a wonderful read, part natural history, part epic trek out of Burma, over the mountains, and Gyles Mackrell, whose film of his elephants braving raging waters to save desperate men has recently been put on YouTube by Cambridge University. The Jiffs failed. Burma was liberated from Japanese rule by the Fourteenth Army, but India, Pakistan and Burma got their independence from the British. Bose came to a sticky end, jumping from Japan to the Soviet Union at the end of the war, before being swallowed up in the Gulag lest he tell tales about the time when Stalin toasted the Nazis with champagne.
This book is dedicated to the memory of the refugees, including children very much like the ones imagined in this book, and to the bravery of the elephant men and their elephants, who did their best to save them.
John Sweeney, London, 2012
About the Author
John Sweeney is a reporter for BBC Panorama who became a YouTube sensation when he lost his temper with a senior member of the Church of Scientology. Before joining the BBC in 2001, Sweeney worked for twelve years at The Observer, where he covered wars and revolutions and unrest in more than sixty countries from Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya to Zimbabwe. He has helped free seven people falsely convicted of killing their babies – starting with Sally Clark and Angela Cannings. Over the course of his career John has won one Emmy, two Royal Television Society prizes, one Sony Gold award, the What The Papers Say Journalist of The Year Prize, an Amnesty International prize and the Paul Foot Award. His hobby is falling off his bike on the way back from the pub. Elephant Moon is his first novel.
Also by John Sweeney
NON-FICTION
The Church of Fear – Inside The Weird World of Scientology
Big Daddy – Lukashenka, The Tyrant of Belarus
Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold
Purple Homicide
Trading With The Enemy: Britain’s Arming of Iraq
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu
Copyright
First published in 2012 by Silvertail Books
www.silvertailbooks.com
Copyright © John Sweeney 2012
ISBN 978-1-909269-09-5
The right of John Sweeney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from
Silvertail Books.